Betts - Psychic Geographies and Other Topics

Psychic Geographies
and Other Topics Psychic Geographies
and Other Topics Gregory Betts Copyright Gregory Betts 2010 The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise stored in an electronic retrieval system without the prior consent (as applicable) of the individual author or the designer, is an infringement of the copyright law. The publication of Psychic Geographies and Other Topics has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts. Cover photograph: The Devil by Bertram Brooker. Image used with the permission of the Estate of Bertram Brooker Cover design: Diane Mascherin
Typography: Grey Wolf Typography Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Betts, Gregory
Psychic geographies and other topics / Gregory Betts. Poems.
ISBN 978-1-926802-00-8 I. Title.

PS8553.E852P89 2010 C811'.54 C2010-901750-1 Published by Quattro Books
P.O. Box 53031, Royal Orchard Postal Station
10 Royal Orchard Blvd., Thornhill, ON L3T 3C0
www.quattrobooks.ca Printed in Canada A landscape haunts, intense as opium. Stphane Mallarm Contents I have brought the speakers, as it were, personally on to my stage to prevent the constant said I and said he of a narrative, and to give the discourse the air of being orally delivered in our hearing. Cicero, On Friendship now you know we came from old watery graves swam dark mirrored seas beneath these long blasphemous legs the story of all founders old ancient orders, lost and found, thirty minutes or free frozen frames the brown box of dreams the pathetic, meek, nuptials destroyed the will of your only slightly bent knee a causation for chaos an ars usurp stars vice verso great grey lady: turn our page, stay spirited stay crux, dumb while the spaceless orbit of your vulva ruptures sunless-set horizons, bad tips, a grain of sand draining every strained foot, it figures the law of the hourglass the hurls of nonchalance, the pooling mass of poverty, the poisons, the vivid intransigence, the made-weary sins come commonplace craning like the long necks of roses rising from murky American rivers; you rise out of these urban rivers, escape float like virgins of a Venetian festa on Ascension Day above the magnificence of meanness. i long to climb your long legs into your story i hear, stand, and star-crossed startled fall back into the nothings heroic anymore feel the vainglory with precipitous mystery you, casting away from fear sail into the isles of Santa Croce, return trailing perdition here onto Park Avenue; your flagged dress moist green squab white dry airy yellow men pissing anxiety, unkissable feet. i follow the orbit of your visionary vortex past planets where time is measured in geospatial distance, where October is still a thousand kilometres away. what changed angel to devil was the choice to keep talking despite all failures we thought we loved art, but art is a sterile trumpet, a strumpet, a division, a discernment offered to all drunk chimeric Kings; serve us, serve under, savant: state rue to us we grew into its waning rules fell into this falling a chorus of eyes fall silent: all us. what changed angel to devil was the choice to keep talking despite all failures we thought we loved art, but art is a sterile trumpet, a strumpet, a division, a discernment offered to all drunk chimeric Kings; serve us, serve under, savant: state rue to us we grew into its waning rules fell into this falling a chorus of eyes fall silent: all us.

Lady, your spontaneous goddess cleaving your fee-fi-fo-dium gulps down sinners and sports fans as we retreat into the Bronze age of the concept, youthful towers lean on the blanched sheen of legend while war and bloodless beliefs swamp us with age. there are too many heroes in this overabundant store too many blue eyes, hunting in their own oceans, for pearls, another birth of spring we can do without the belief in history fat habits are the clothings of cold dreams unfortunate is a mild word worse than decadence we have to answer a world of questions transfigured to poetry like invaders landing from beneath the sea La Bella Marina. you rise, stride into this masterly brilliance like a sculpture of our haunted silence. Still I stand, forced to shift curious at the digital photograph makers who twitter titter circle your vagina. I am in the shadow of your great rock. I am convinced of the wilderness of your pictures that spread out and transgress the grid of these streets. Super-statue looms above me.

Unpretentious and freaky, as one written in dark, star-laced waters. Her glass fragrance shatters shards grinding ground sands illusions that she leaves no scent of her own is the remnant and the anticipation of mirage maps wrinkle forever ridges, ripples, cuts and tears rivers and legends move across landscapes marked from the centre out inked by solar progress hills wane, tides rise mountains ravines, soft coastlines, spill over provincial eyes sheathe violence, off the map coal mine collapse fallow logging road roadside shrines, desiccated flowers maps provoke the terror of perfection, cold flesh realities like frozen points like alloy tubes encircling primeval etchings of buried oil; into desiccated creek beds, lines dissolve in lines rings of older roadways maps never sleep never slip in their production of cities and towns infill space invasion the dissection of meridians and wilderness hangs like quotes between people in the spoken place Steam thistle wars
natural resources money to
publish stars publish burning
flurries, white sheets in the
you are my rose rising
risen wizened acres of
translucent forests the death I seek
paintings received suddenly discovered
plastic planets or care
the constellations still oceans
forming I take great satisfaction in the empty honour of my fruitless penetration. Cicero, Letter to Aulus Torquatus Wait for it, leave it, keep your eye on it, slap it, drink it, wait for it, get it, get it, take it taste it, make it, naked, call it, write it, remember it. Well have to talk about it. Lets wait and see it out. Itll wait.

Itll have to. Well get there, well talk, just wait it out. Emily Carr stands beside the train feeling the swell of words drain away. Her fingers trace the curve of obtrusions on the horizon, each tree, hill, house a blurred gesture carved through diesel odour, smouldered iron. This is that what this get there did that that makes me fuck off you cant he should evening for shoes things havent changed much going to Toronto. Pemmican is a dream of brown like a cope worn clergy, a strong dose of hell and damnation, a rose that entangles pilsner gold drinks, the dancing gold around prohibition, inhibition, the gambling gold, the gambol.

There is a spiral working its way through the train, like cosmic ants outside of gravity, consuming metal. She can feel everything from fur trimmed gauntlets to the cold hands of the unemployed on the cool night roof to Ottawa. Her mother gave black beads to new mothers in place of lace. Dark stars that shine of home on train swept rivers. causea memoria, the new brutality, a coin toss glimmers, the dim sight of new signs advertising shrapnel, front doors close for shootings, back doors open, fuck you mister death means anyone but you fuck you mister death means you are afraid and a bank, calling you collect, repossessive tense, sidewalk stained, infectious money singular i have seen a cinema of servants flinch in the service of a king outside of the imaginable this is how it feels to realize you are already inside the palace walls never nor no closer to any throne this kind of fight the modern spirit of constant implication the new McCarthyism sneakers boxing day shootouts on the thirteenth day of christmas, true love wept, bodies christ blood christened new square, life a productive brand of violence so we read McCarthys West Texas 1980 in the tremble of virtual violence old ways form reading Americas failure to come to terms comes to term Americas failure substance style, subconscious conversations the frontier, the road, the nausea brutality is always foreign shocks our stockings off there is always something wrong with anything a film with bones in the noses a film with Yeats in the noses this is no country for old men pitiless as the sun an apparition of a golden gun set high upon a drowsy, blood bough the new jerusalem is reunited with god between the beginning and the end of gods plan the end times the mass of god is the apocalypse but life outside the book in the new jerusalem is to make of humanity a series of clay ashtrays the second world war is a holocaust bomb dropped on the japanese a profound sign a smear of optimism the low-cussed force of capital humans survive almost to the present find the monster at the end of the book In the case of the waste land the first world war returns as a traditional religion of heretics fragments of virgins in terror. see salt in stone lichen snow i cant see see deep freeze setting in i cant say the cloud of white pouring from my open mouth cant see what it is the none word at the end of the language shades of white shades of what withall without a village in this country is a house in a clearing surrounded by stark trees a nipple to which the wild urge lunges encircles and snares traplines with rusted teeth and mocking fox pairs that know the knife trick of constellations, smell the myth through salivatory meat a camp is a finger brushed along the chain that by confusion stands swings in unscaled orbit, kills the mocking snap-toothed dog escapes into the hungry river bed sleeps with the reflection of stars a star is the point between a compass and a passion orientation and orient where whoops become wampum raiding becomes trading a star is the cross entering time startled, star led, always just in the beginning Here is the battleground Batoche: Fishers store, Garnots Stopping Place Letendes store Francois-Xavier on the banks of the South Saskatchewan. see salt in stone lichen snow i cant see see deep freeze setting in i cant say the cloud of white pouring from my open mouth cant see what it is the none word at the end of the language shades of white shades of what withall without a village in this country is a house in a clearing surrounded by stark trees a nipple to which the wild urge lunges encircles and snares traplines with rusted teeth and mocking fox pairs that know the knife trick of constellations, smell the myth through salivatory meat a camp is a finger brushed along the chain that by confusion stands swings in unscaled orbit, kills the mocking snap-toothed dog escapes into the hungry river bed sleeps with the reflection of stars a star is the point between a compass and a passion orientation and orient where whoops become wampum raiding becomes trading a star is the cross entering time startled, star led, always just in the beginning Here is the battleground Batoche: Fishers store, Garnots Stopping Place Letendes store Francois-Xavier on the banks of the South Saskatchewan.